A new stretchable quantum-dot light-emitting diode (QLED) delivers incredibly high resolution while producing record brightness that can be clearly viewed even outside in direct sunlight.
In a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, Korean researchers unveiled a new QLED material with applications far beyond televisions, stretching into many future daily-use technologies.
This new QLED can stretch in every direction, just like organic skin, making it extremely useful in future wearable applications and as a covering for soft robots. Unlike earlier attempts to make a stretchable QLED, this one doesn’t lose picture quality when it stretches, delivering high resolution and extreme brightness under tension.
For most of us, QLEDs are familiar as one of the technologies available in modern televisions. Conventional QLED TVs use quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductor crystals—to help produce exceptionally bright and vivid colors. OLED displays, by comparison, use self-emissive pixels that can switch off individually, allowing them to produce deeper blacks. While OLEDs perform particularly well in dark viewing environments, the high brightness achievable with quantum-dot displays can make them especially well-suited for brightly lit environments.
Despite the technology’s suitability for the bright world around us rather than just darkened environments, major challenges remained in producing a stretchable version. Early attempts addressed the problem by allowing the wiring to stretch while the light-emitting pixels remained unchanged in size. This meant that as the material expanded, its effective resolution dropped because the same number of pixels became spread across a wider area, much like enlarging a low-resolution digital image.
Building on these efforts, some researchers attempted to replace conventional materials with more stretchable alternatives, but these tended to make achieving high resolutions and efficiently moving electrical charge through the material difficult. As a result, these systems produced dimmer, lower-resolution images, limiting their utility.
The researchers developed a new fabrication approach to address some of the major problems facing stretchable QLED technology. Central to their innovation is the use of an elastic polymer incorporating MPA as a ligand, or bonding molecule. This approach improves charge injection efficiency while helping eliminate the image stretching and smearing that have affected previous stretchable displays.
Using this new process, the researchers produced a display with a resolution of about 16,000 pixels per inch, with features spaced at roughly 700 nanometers. Red, green, and blue emissive layers can also be precisely arranged, allowing the stretchable material to produce full-color images.
In tests, the team’s new QLED proved to be a major advance. They successfully stretched the material to 1.65 times its original size with no damage to its light-emitting performance. Additionally, their stretchable QLEDs were the brightest ever tested at 53,300 nits, more than triple the brilliance of prior attempts.
Based on these tests, the researchers see numerous future applications for their material in extended reality devices, soft robots, electronic skin, wearable technologies, health care, and automotive displays.
“We resolved both the drop in resolution and the limits on light-emitting performance, which had been the biggest challenges for stretchable displays, and secured core technology for commercialization,” concluded co-author Professor Moon Kee Choi of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. “It will be used widely as a manufacturing platform for various next-generation soft devices, including wearables and electronic skin.”
The paper, “High-Resolution Intrinsically Stretchable Quantum-Dot Displays Through Thermally Assisted Intaglio Transfer Printing,” appeared in Nature Nanotechnology on September 14, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
A small piece of material sits nearly motionless in the dark. However, shine light on it and within seconds it begins to swell at an extraordinary rate. Aim the light differently, and the same material can curl itself into a left-handed helix, reverse into a right-handed one, twist into more complicated shapes, or mimic the vines of a climbing plant.
Then turn the lights off, and the instructions disappear.
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have developed a new photoresponsive hydrogel whose 3D shape can effectively expand, change, or even be rewritten into an entirely different configuration depending on where light strikes it.
In experiments reported in Nature Communications, the material expanded more than 80,000% within 40 seconds and could be repeatedly programmed into helices, twists, and hybrid structures.
Researchers also used its light-controlled motion to lift objects and drive a miniature rotary system, pointing toward possible applications in smart materials and soft robotics.
“Reconfiguring handedness in synthetic systems with spatiotemporal control and reversible behavior remains a fundamental challenge in bioinspired robotics and materials science,” researchers write. “Here, we demonstrate homogeneous photoactive hydrogels capable of ultrafast, programmable handed shape-morphing, including helices and twists, through spatially controlled light illumination.”
The ability to program the material after it has already been formed makes the breakthrough especially unusual.
Many shape-changing materials are manufactured with their future behavior already built into them. Different layers, directional fibers, compositional gradients, and pre-patterned structures determine how they will eventually bend, curl, or twist. Once fabricated, those instructions can be difficult, if not impossible, to change.
The new hydrogel begins as a structurally uniform material, with the asymmetry required for complex motion instead created temporarily by the pattern of incoming light. The key to making that possible is an unusually powerful swelling response.
The researchers incorporated a light-sensitive molecule known as spiropyran into a polymer network. When illuminated, the molecule experiences a chemical change that alters the electrical interactions between portions of the polymer. Attractions that normally help keep the network compact weaken or become repulsive, allowing the chains to spread apart and absorb large amounts of water.
The resulting expansion is dramatic. The researchers measured more than 80,000% volume growth after only 40 seconds of irradiation, a combination of speed and magnitude they say exceeds previously reported photoresponsive hydrogels.
Yet, simply making the hydrogel swell was only part of the experiment.
By controlling where the light hits, the team could make some portions of the material expand faster than others. Illuminating one side of a narrow strip creates a swelling gradient through its thickness. The resulting strain mismatch causes the strip to bend first, then curl into a helix.
Illuminating both sides produces a different internal swelling distribution. Rather than curling in the same manner, the strip buckles and rotates along its length, creating a twisted structure. Those shapes are not locked in place. Once the light is removed, the hydrogel relaxes and can later be programmed again.
The direction of the illumination can even determine the material’s “handedness.” Light arriving from one angle can produce a left-handed helix, while lighting the same strip from the opposite direction produces a right-handed one after the material has relaxed in darkness. Researchers repeatedly switched samples back and forth and found that the material retained its reconfigurability after more than 20 consecutive cycles.
More complicated lighting designs produced even stranger results.
By illuminating separate regions of a longer strip independently, researchers created structures containing multiple forms at once. One section could form a helix while another became a twist. Other patterns produced neighboring helices with opposite handedness or helix-twist-helix combinations, creating shapes reminiscent of the spiraling tendrils plants use to wrap around supports.
That ability to rewrite a material’s geometry also translated into mechanical output.
In one demonstration, a 6 mg strip curled into a spring capable of lifting a 50 mg payload or more than eight times its own weight. Researchers also created a light-controlled underwater switch in which the hydrogel moved two conductors into contact, as well as a tendril-like actuator that encircled another object.
The most elaborate demonstration turned the hydrogel’s twisting motion into locomotion.
Researchers connected a floating propeller to a hydrogel strip that served as a rotating shaft, with a paddle attached below the water. When light caused the hydrogel to twist, the paddle rotated, and the propeller began both spinning and traveling around a circular path. Programming the hydrogel’s handedness allowed the system to produce clockwise or counterclockwise motion.
Potentially, the hydrogel breakthrough could lead to soft robots that change shape or movement depending on the task, light-controlled grippers that wrap around delicate objects, or adaptive components that reconfigure themselves without conventional motors and mechanical parts.
Similar hydrogel materials might eventually serve as tiny switches, valves, pumps, or rotating actuators in conditions where running wires or fitting traditional machinery is difficult. Because the same configuration can be reprogrammed rather than permanently locked into one behavior, it could also open the door to devices that perform several different mechanical functions at different times.
However, for now, the experiments remain laboratory demonstrations. Researchers say the material will need faster response times to compete with some other classes of soft actuators.
Further research might improve the efficiency of its molecular photoswitches and redesign the polymer network so water can move through it more quickly.
Still, the wider concept suggests a different way of thinking about programmable matter. Instead of manufacturing a material with one predetermined set of movements, its instructions could arrive afterward as a pattern of light, then disappear and be replaced whenever a different behavior is needed.
“The core innovation of this work lies in the achievement of precise, reversible regulation of structural handedness in homogeneous hydrogels purely via external optical modulation,” researchers write. “The design principle presented here—reversibly encoding spatiotemporally programmable handedness within a homogeneous network through simple light patterns—establishes a method for creating intelligent, adaptive materials with embedded logic and function.”
The study, “Reconfiguring handed shape-morphing and actuation in hydrogels via light-encoded rapid expansion,” appeared in Nature Communications.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Após o rumor de que a Apple teria cancelado o desenvolvimento do projeto de um iPhone comemorativo de 20 anos da linha, o jornalista Mark Gurman afirmou em nova publicação na Bloomberg que os planos da empresa para esse suposto futuro aparelho seguem mais do que de pé.
Como ele já havia relatado anteriormente, a ideia da Apple é lançar os modelos Pro do ano que vem (chamados internamente de V73 e V74) com um design majoritariamente de vidro — material que estará tanto na parte frontal quanto na traseira, bem como na lateral, que será curva.
Posts relacionados
Essa lateral deverá contar com uma faixa metálica adicional para lhe dar suporte — uma adição que teria ocorrido no meio do projeto, depois que a Apple passou a enfrentar problemas na tentativa de conectar os dois painéis de vidro sem qualquer material intermediário.
Em resumo, o roteiro de produtos planejados pela Apple não teria mudado — os iPhones de vidro já estariam em fase avançada de testes e praticamente finalizados — e fontes na empresa afirmaram que ela espera “causar impacto” com a mudança no ano que vem.
Antes desse lançamento, no entanto, a Apple deverá lançar neste ano o primeiro iPhone dobrável (junto aos novos modelos Pro, com visual semelhante aos da geração atual), bem como o “iPhone 18”, o “iPhone Air 2” e o “iPhone 18e” — estes, porém, apenas no início do ano que vem.
NOTA DE TRANSPARÊNCIA: O MacMagazine recebe uma pequena comissão sobre vendas concluídas por meio de links deste post, mas você, como consumidor, não paga nada mais pelos produtos/serviços usando os nossos links de afiliado.
O Apple Watch já está no mercado há mais de uma década. De lá para cá, a Maçã lançou inúmeras variações do smartwatch, com tamanhos, cores, materiais e coleções diferentes.
Justamente por isso, muita gente enfrenta dificuldades em identificar exatamente qual modelo de relógio possui. Felizmente, um truque muito simples permite conferir isso no iPhone ou no próprio Apple Watch.
Veja como! ⌚️
Posts relacionados
NOTA DE TRANSPARÊNCIA: O MacMagazine recebe uma pequena comissão sobre vendas concluídas por meio de links deste post, mas você, como consumidor, não paga nada mais pelos produtos/serviços usando os nossos links de afiliado.
Researchers have demonstrated an unusual new form of 3D printing capable of building entirely new structures directly onto—and even around—existing objects in just seconds. In a series of experiments, the technique printed microscopic fluid channels around embedded glass spheres, fabricated precision gears onto polished steel rods, and even built a miniature lens directly onto the surface of a working LED.
The breakthrough, described in a paper published in Nature Communications, relies on an advanced form of tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (TVAM) that allows researchers to “overprint” new structures onto components made from a wide range of materials, including metal, glass, and preassembled microfluidic components. Instead of constructing objects layer by layer like conventional 3D printers, the system projects precisely calculated light patterns into a rotating vat of photosensitive resin, causing an entire three-dimensional object to solidify almost simultaneously within seconds.
The advancement could represent a major step toward making volumetric 3D printing practical in real-world manufacturing environments, where new components often must be integrated with parts that already exist.
It additionally highlights the growing sophistication of computational techniques that can accurately model how light behaves as it passes through materials that absorb, scatter, refract, or reflect light.
“Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) is a light-based 3D printing technique capable of producing centimeter-scale objects within seconds,” researchers write. “This work demonstrates a broad range of overprinting scenarios, where new structures are directly printed onto or around pre-existing components made from different materials.”
Unlike conventional stereolithography or fused-filament printers that gradually build an object from one direction, tomographic volumetric printing projects hundreds of two-dimensional light patterns into a rotating container filled with liquid resin.
As the resin accumulates enough light energy, the desired three-dimensional structure appears almost simultaneously throughout the volume rather than emerging layer by layer. The approach can produce centimeter-scale objects in mere seconds.
However, until now, one of the technology’s greatest challenges has been accurately calculating how light travels through complicated environments.
Existing objects inside the resin can block, scatter, or bend incoming light, degrading print quality. Conventional models often assume these objects are either completely transparent or completely opaque. This is an oversimplification that breaks down in realistic manufacturing scenarios.
To overcome those limitations, the team developed an upgraded computational framework called Dr.TVAM. Built upon physically based ray tracing, the software models how light propagates through materials with different optical properties while simultaneously optimizing the projected light patterns needed to create the desired object.
Because the framework accounts for reflection, refraction, scattering, absorption, and arbitrary container shapes, it can successfully print structures around components that previously would have interfered with the process.
One of the study’s most compelling demonstrations involved manufacturing microfluidic channels directly inside sealed, preassembled square chambers. Microfluidic devices contain microscopic channels that transport tiny volumes of liquids and are widely used in biomedical research, diagnostics, and organ-on-a-chip systems.
Instead of fabricating the channels separately and assembling the device afterward—a process that can introduce contamination or leaks—the researchers successfully printed perfusable channels directly inside an already assembled chamber while accounting for inlet and outlet structures that would otherwise obstruct the light.
They demonstrated straight channels, branching networks, and spiral geometries capable of carrying fluid after fabrication. Supplementary demonstrations showed colored dye successfully flowing through the finished structures.
The researchers then pushed the concept even further by creating what they describe as context-aware printing. In this experiment, they embedded two tiny glass spheres inside a hydrogel-filled chamber, rapidly determined each sphere’s three-dimensional position using two camera images, and generated customized print patterns in less than a minute.
Those optimized projections produced hollow channels connecting each sphere to inlet and outlet ports while simultaneously printing protective cavities around the spheres themselves. The complete workflow—from detecting the embedded objects to generating printing instructions and fabricating the final structure—required less than three minutes.
That ability could eventually enable highly customized biomedical manufacturing, where printers automatically adapt to the precise location of living tissues, organoids, or other biological materials rather than requiring perfect positioning beforehand.
Another experiment highlighted why precisely modeling light matters.
Previous demonstrations of volumetric overprinting treated metal components as though they completely absorbed incoming light. In reality, polished metal reflects and scatters significant amounts of light, creating distortions that reduce print quality.
Researchers tested both assumptions by printing a gear directly onto a polished steel rod. When the software ignored scattered light, the gear’s fine holes became over-polymerized and poorly defined.
After including realistic scattering behavior into the optical model, however, the resulting gear preserved those elaborate features far more accurately, increasing simulated print fidelity substantially. The improvement was confirmed experimentally.
Researchers even went as far as demonstrating that the process could print directly onto an electronic component.
Using an LED-based volumetric printing system, the researchers fabricated both a miniature lens and a small cross-shaped symbol directly onto the surface of a red LED. When illuminated, the printed lens projected the symbol onto a screen, successfully transforming the LED into a tiny optical projector without requiring additional assembly. The experiment showcased how optical elements themselves could potentially be integrated directly onto existing electronic hardware during manufacturing.
Beyond the individual demonstrations, the work additionally underscores an important trend in additive manufacturing: increasingly sophisticated software is becoming just as important as advances in hardware.
Instead of relying on simplified mathematical approximations, the new framework performs physically based optical simulations capable of modeling arbitrary geometries along with material properties.
The software has been released as open source, along with configuration files and experimental data, allowing other researchers to reproduce and expand upon the 3D printing work.
Although the current demonstrations remain laboratory-scale, the possible implications could extend well beyond experimental 3D printing. Biomedical researchers could eventually fabricate sterile microfluidic systems without multi-step assembly. Optical engineers may integrate lenses directly onto light sources. Manufacturers could add custom features to finished components without redesigning entire production processes.
Researchers also note that future improvements could further increase realism through incorporating additional physical effects, including changes in refractive index during polymerization and the diffusion of chemical inhibitors during printing. Those refinements could expand the technology’s accuracy and enable even more complex manufacturing scenarios.
“In summary, Dr.TVAM, our computational framework, has shown to be capable of modeling different optical situations for TVAM,” researchers write. “We believe this significantly expands the application space for TVAM, enabling the creation of complex, functionalized, and multi-component devices from applications in mechanics, optics, or biofabrication.”
Study: Wechsler F, et al. “Overprinting with tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing.” Nature Communications (2026).
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Engineers at Queen Mary University of London have created a tactile sensor, described in a study published in Science Advances, that allows robots to detect touch using a simple camera.
The sensor converts mechanical forces into visible color patterns, reducing the need for dense arrays of embedded sensors. Giacomo Sasso, a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary’s School of Engineering and Materials Science, led the team that developed this new sensor. Rather than relying on embedded electronic sensors, they created a soft material that changes color when pressed or bent.
This effect, known as structural color, is the same reason butterfly wings look iridescent without pigment. Pressure causes microscopic structures within the material to shift, altering how light reflects and creating a real-time visual indicator of force.
Most vision-based tactile sensors can map contact and force in detail, but only at the cost of heavy computation that slows them down. Simpler systems are faster, but sacrifice detail. The new material developed by Sasso’s team sidesteps this problem by building the sensing function into the material itself. With just a standard USB camera, researchers can track color changes on the surface and immediately infer pressure, strain, and contact shape without complex data reconstruction.
“You won’t guess how much information is generated when your finger presses a light switch. A human hand contains more than 10,000 mechanoreceptors to do the job, yet touch sensing remains one of the major challenges in robotics,” Sasso said. “We were happy to capture the finger ridges, as no existing technology can reproduce such sensor density at [a] comparable scale and simplicity. The key idea behind this project was to think outside the box: instead of embedding dense and overengineered sensor arrays, sensing is moved into the material itself, where mechanical cues are directly transformed into colour fields and captured using a simple low-cost USB camera.”
Professor James Busfield, one of the paper’s co-authors, described the advantage more simply: “What is particularly powerful is that the information is already in the light signal. You are no longer reconstructing touch – you are observing it directly.”
Reducing the computational demands of touch sensing opens up new possibilities. A robotic gripper made with this material could handle tiny parts more gently, since changes in force are immediately detectable. Prosthetic limbs equipped with similar sensors could also provide users with more detailed tactile feedback.
The researchers also see potential applications in surgery, where detecting subtle pressure differences could help clinicians interpret tissue properties.
Professor Federico Carpi from the University of Florence and Professor James Busfield from Queen Mary worked together on this project, merging years of separate work on stretchable sensors and polymer behavior into one material system. This allowed the team to use a mechanochromic material as the sensor itself, not just as a base for electronics.
Many approaches to robotic touch have relied on increasingly complex sensor arrays, wiring, and computing systems. Rather than adding more electronics, Sasso’s team’s approach allows the material itself to encode touch into visible color. It remains unclear whether this color-based method can be scaled for use in commercial robotic hands, but this work suggests that the future of robotic touch might rely as much on smart materials as on advanced electronics.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Volcanic minerals may help drones absorb radar, but tests haven't confirmed the claim.
Login